Tuesday, March 6, 2018

Why The Left Is Going Gonzo Over Asking Citizenship Status On The Census

The question affects the number of seats in the House of Representatives, and the number of presidential electors allocated to each state.

Is it a bigger threat to republican government when American citizens are hypothetically better represented, or when noncitizens in actuality dilute their representation? This is a question at the core of an emerging controversy over a seemingly trivial question the Department of Justice has urged the Census Bureau to reinstate on the 2020 Census: Are you a U.S. citizen?

The census is essential to our political process because it provides a population count of citizens and noncitizens that drives apportionment of U.S. House seats, and by extension the number of presidential electors allocated to each state. The census also dictates where and to whom the federal government doles out hundreds of billions of dollars.

The DOJ is pushing to reinstate the citizenship question because it says the government needs a more accurate count of the citizen voting-age population in order to enforce the Voting Rights Act, which protects voters from discrimination including vote-dilution. In addition to the solid legal, political and practical grounds for the DOJ’s position, it seems reasonable that the government and the public should have reliable citizenship figures given how critical the numbers are to our political system.

Democrats disagree. In the words of 17 state attorneys general, including a citizenship question could risk an “unconstitutional undercount” by chilling noncitizen respondents.

That those state attorneys general were recently joined by former Obama administration Attorney General Eric Holder indicates the gravity of this issue for the Left. Why? Illegal aliens tend to live in large blue urban areas. The greater the population figures due to the counting of illegal aliens, the more political power and bacon such states can bring in.